Googling something has never made me so as excited as these 8 letters in this particular order. I wanted to blog about life changing chemicals that are already making our world better, but I wanted to be different and share with my friends something theoretical! Theoretical chemistry!
Let’s start at the beginning; reader, meet graphite:
The lead in your pencil, the contacts in your electric motor, and one day the key to your future!
The hexagonal honeycomb layers you see made of blue spheres and solid black lines is the pure strength of nature. Its chemistry telling us to know our place and keep quiet. Those layers are 200 times stronger than man made steel, and occur naturally in the form of coal.
There is a reason we don’t make skyscrapers out of charcoal though. Unfortunately graphite has a hidden weakness. The solid lines represent very strong covalent bonds. You can put your faith in those, in fact most of the bonds between chemicals in your body are made of those, so that’s fine. What not cool is the dashed lines between the hexagon layers. Whilst covalent bonds are INTERmolecular bonds, the separate layers of graphite are held together by induced dipoles, which are INTRAmolecular bonds. Think of the difference between the intermolecular bonds and intramolecular bonds similar to welding two sheets of metal together and asking them nicely to stay put!
So why not keep the cool part and work with that instead? Of course, we’ve done it. In 2008 scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov (now both winners of Nobel Prizes, knighted sirs of the United Kingdom and chemistry rock starts) solved the centuries old problem of isolating a single layer of graphite by sticking a piece of scotch tape to a sample, and ripping it off. What was stuck to the bottom of that tape was pure gold in terms of chemistry (pun intended). Sir Geim and Novoselov thought so far outside the box the box disappeared over the horizon, and a new horizon of possibilities is just around the corner. Just like how plastics revolutionized the world in the 20th century, the 21st century might have its new plastic. Hooray for hydrocarbons!
So what’s so great about graphene? Well here’s a list:
• It’s the world’s first 2D object; only extending in the latitudinal and longitudinal planes.
• Its conductive because of a field of delocalized electrons
• It’s super hard and strong
• And it’s incredibly easy to make and manufacture, since all you need is layers of graphene and your imagination.
And that’s what we’re working with. Let’s see what minds greater than us have come up with regarding graphene:
Biomedical
When graphene is oxidized it is a great stock molecule that is a base from which to further functionalize the graphene molecule to make it more specific for a certain job. The oxidized graphene is called GO colloquially.
These GO molecules are on a scale of nanometers, with 1-3 layers being just 2 nanometers thick (or 2x10-9 m thick OR 0.0000000009 meters).
GO that has carboxylic acid (COOH) and hydroxyl (OH) functional groups are said to be very ‘biocompatible’, meaning our bodies can easily work with these molecules. And moreover, those groups mentioned up there can be the ‘docks’ to which many drugs and medical concoctions are attached, then introduced to the body via means that can be less invasive than before.
One greatly promising future application of this technology is in cancer treatment. GO molecules can be ‘loaded’ with multiple drugs which to my understanding bombard the cancer with an array of substances designed to harm only the bad cells. Beforehand the payload could only be administered the old fashioned way; through injections (less direct) and an intake of pills (VERY indirect). I guess you could say the current (hopefully soon to old) methods are like carpet bombing the targeted cells and everything around it whereas GO delivery systems will be similar to a precision SWAT team strike.
Energy
Now let’s fly away from the topic of cancer, and talk about our worldwide energy crisis…in our phones.
Battery and portable power supply technology hasn’t actually advanced very far ever since the 1960s! Lithium ion batteries made huge advancements during his period and we have been gradually making things slightly better until now, but no breakthrough or big leap as we have had with the actual things being run off of those batteries since then (think about the brick phones of the 70s to the iPhones of 2007! Just take out the b, r, c and the k).
Thankfully there’s graphene to the rescue. For a good power source to work it needs to have the best of the following features:
• High volume
• High surface area
• Conductive
• Chemically and physically stable
• Low weight
This reminds me of graphene. The high volume and surface area is essential.
The amount of charge (or ‘power’) a battery can have is a function of its volume. Think of the charge as the air in a balloon. Big balloon = lots of air ≃ lots of power (and a bigger fright when someone pops it).
And the surface area describes how fast the battery will discharge and can recharge. It’s like how you will lose heat a lot faster in winter if you expose more surface area of your skin (that’s proven already, don’t go and test it out).
So graphene is doubly, triply and singlehandedly the best material we currently have for building next gen batteries.
Even better, researchers predict future cells can actually be modular; you can make batteries for larger and larger machines just by slapping more and more cells together until you’ve got one big enough to power whatever you need to work. Imagine if one graphene cell was a LEGO brick, its cuboidal has its own volume and surface area. You can stick one hundred together to make a cell phone battery or one thousand to make a power source for an electric car! See how the volume and S.A. increases linearly, making bigger batteries more powerful, easier to discharge, and better suited to their job automatically? This is an almost too perfect system to power our future!
Technology
In the future we’ll be injecting ourselves with graphene and charging ourselves with it. But how about wearing it?
Wearable technology is a new emerging market that has a strong foothold all over the world. From Jawbones to iWatches, funny names and incredible electronics are abound, improving our wellbeing, for example by allowing doctors who use Google Glass to quickly read patient history and data to better diagnose and help them, to giving us luxuries, like the Jabra wireless earphones that have built in heart rate monitors.
Where in the world do we go from here? Smaller.
As we’ve seen before graphene can be forged into so many different shapes and sizes due to its simplistic structure. The electronics industry has always been working towards the tiniest dimensions possible to allow a device to accommodate more features.
Since graphene can essentially be worked from the size of a carbon atom upwards, there are no limits, since we are already staring at the limit.
Firstly, more processing power than ever is possible because of graphene’s conductivity. Transistors and highly advanced microchips (perhaps we will start calling them nanochips) can multiply the amount of data being processed exponentially, and if you need even more, just plug some additional components in there.
The difference between 1 GB of storage space 25 years ago and now. The device that holds 1 GB in the future probably can’t even be viewed by the human eye.
Secondly, graphene is very flexible. This could potentially allow flexible and fully functional electronic screens.
Combining this with minuscule processors even means you could have a computer and a screen all in one.
Imagine camping in the future. Instead of a traditional map, you could get ones that are actually an entire screen, with built-in features like GPS to keep track of you, or weather prediction so you know when best to stop and rest.
Or since these technologies are so small, why not have a computer surgically placed on your body? I could get an entire computer placed in my body, perhaps for example my arm. Then I could get a foldable screen that receives information from my body and displays it for me. Who knows, perhaps with advancing power supplies, I could run the computer with my own body, never having to recharge it.
The only question is, how long will it be, and how do I download songs into myself?
one of the most important product of petroleum is plastic. Nowadays plastic is the most common material in daily due to their relatively low cost, ease of manufacture, versatility, and imperviousness to water. They have already displaced many traditional materials, such as wood, stone, horn and bone, leather, paper, metal, glass, and ceramic, in most of their former uses. 
Second one is fuel. This is the blood for modern society. 
Most common petroleum's fuel product are gasoline, kerosene, heavy crude oil and diesel. Most of vehicles burn gasoline in order to run. Airplanes needs jet fuel. some power plants use petroleum to produce electricity in some area. As the world is globalized. The demand of fuel is getting stronger and stronger. Our environment also face a great danger due to greenhouse gases. But till now we don't have any other resources that can replace petroleum.
Petroleum is the mixture mainly consists various kinds of Alkanes; Naphthalene and Aromatic Hydrocarbon. In smaller view It mainly constitute by carbon and hydrogen. Around 83%~87% is carbon, 10 %~14% hydrogen there are also Oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur but the content is less than 1%. It is oily liquid Which is usually dark brown, brownish black, blackish green and sometime transparent. 
